Eileen Dunlop's disappearance from X-ville

Eileen Dunlop’s disappearance from X-ville is the turning point that ends her life in her family home and begins her escape from it. Planned in secrecy and carried out without a dramatic confrontation, the departure brings together Eileen’s long-held sense of being unseen, her fraught attachment to Rebecca, and a final, unexpectedly calm farewell to her father.

Setting and preparation

The departure takes place in late December 1964. Eileen is twenty-four, earns fifty-seven dollars a week as a secretary at Moorehead, a private juvenile correctional facility she regards as a prison for children, and lives with her father in the town where she was born and raised. She says she will be gone within a week and never return. In her later account, she explains that she wanted people to fear she had died or been abducted rather than know that she had chosen to leave; she expected her father to treat a voluntary escape as grounds for humiliation.

Her plans emerge from a profound estrangement from herself and from the life she inhabits. As a young woman, she sees herself as ugly, awkward, and invisible, and describes herself as persistently unhappy and angry. At Moorehead she practices a composed expression she calls a death mask, concealing her sensitivity while carrying out routine duties. Her work also requires her to enforce rules that keep the imprisoned boys in a state of desperation, even as she witnesses their mothers’ distress. The controlled manner she presents at work contrasts with the private intensity of her wish to escape.

Her imagined departure is not emotionally detached. Eileen wants her father to believe her loss is irreversible and to grieve for her, even picturing him confronting the belongings of a daughter he had failed to appreciate. That imagined mourning reveals how closely her plan is bound to a desire for recognition: she wants to vanish from his reach, but also wants her absence to make her matter to him.

Rebecca and the uncertain alliance

Rebecca becomes part of the emotional background to the escape. After an evening at O’Hara’s, Rebecca praises Eileen’s unusual face and suggests that she has brilliant dreams. Eileen leaves the encounter feeling beloved and important, a sharp contrast with her habitual self-contempt. Later, however, Eileen learns that Rebecca’s friendship had also served a purpose: Rebecca believed Eileen could be useful to her. The discovery wounds Eileen, who had preferred to think the bond rested on admiration and affection.

Even after that disillusionment, Rebecca’s appeal to Eileen’s trust draws her back into the alliance. At the end, though, Eileen knows Rebecca will not come with her and describes her as having gone long before the final departure. She judges Rebecca’s idealism harshly but says she holds no lasting grudge. Their unfinished connection makes the escape a separation as well as a flight from home: Eileen leaves without the person whose attention had briefly made her feel visible.

The final departure

Before leaving, Eileen helps her father drink gin and leads him to bed. She says good night, watches him drift to sleep, and closes the door. The scene has none of the reckoning or grand finale she might once have imagined. He is her father, but in that moment she accepts the ordinary finality of the goodbye rather than forcing it into a dramatic resolution.

In the bathroom mirror, Eileen sees a new certainty in her face. The money in her purse and the weight of the gun confirm that the moment to go has arrived. She acknowledges that the house matters to her: its rooms, furnishings, stairs, and worn surfaces are part of her life, and she expects to grieve for them later. For now, she bids them farewell and leaves. She imagines a parting gesture that might provoke her father, but does not carry it out. Her departure is therefore neither a clean rejection of home nor a triumphant break; it is a painful decision made with resolve.

Retrospective account and significance

Eileen narrates the event from decades later, warning that her memories have waxed and waned and that she includes details for the mood they preserve. This retrospective perspective distinguishes what she wanted her father to believe from what she actually did, and what she once hoped Rebecca’s affection meant from what she later understood about Rebecca’s motives. The account does not present the escape as a simple liberation: Eileen later recognizes that the world beyond X-ville, including New York City, exposed her to dangers she had not anticipated.

The departure’s decisive change is from imagined disappearance to enacted separation. Eileen leaves without telling her father her plan, without Rebecca, and without a final speech. The quietness of the act gives its consequences their force: she relinquishes a home she still loves, abandons the hope that Rebecca will accompany her, and begins the life beyond X-ville that she will later describe as a disappearance.